Tuesday, October 30, 2012

"Are We Still Treating Secular Jews Like We Treated Spinoza? Secular Jews Want Secular And Cultural Outlets For Their Judaism That The Jewish Community Still Refuses To Provide"

Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com October 28, 2012

Baruch Spinoza

A poll of 1,000 American Jews reveals that almost one in six are
trying to find a way to express themselves Jewishly outside of
affiliation with a synagogue or religious programing.The study,
which was paid for by the Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring and conducted by
Ipsos Internet, reportedly debunks the myth that American Jews either
identify culturally or religiously as Jews as an either/or proposition.

Respondents
who identified themselves as “spiritual" or “cultural” and were engaged
in Jewish life were alienated from synagogue membership or synagogue
attendance, even though they practiced some religious rituals on their
own and believed that religion was very important to them.

Just
under 40% of those surveyed were under 35-years-old. 56% of respondents
said they held a deep attachment to Israel, which the Workmen’s Circle
claims is larger than “any other non-Orthodox group". In past
Workmen’s Circle surveys, Jews who defined themselves as cultural Jews
were “more passive about their approach to Jewish life,” a rather murky
Sholom Life report reprinted in Ynet notes.

However,
this year’s survey shows that there appears to be a shift in the way
those respondents identifying as "cultural Jews" try to express their
Judaism. These cultural Jews care about Jewish values and want to
be affiliated with the Jewish community, but mostly want to experience
this outside of a synagogue setting. But the Jewish community has
few programs or publications aimed at these cultural Jews outside of
traditional outreach-style programs meant to convert these secular Jews
to various forms of Orthodoxy or ultra-Orthodoxy.Secular Jewish
funders like Michael Steinhardt have refused to fund programs that would
actually benefit these cultural Jews, and have instead focused on
funding various Orthodox outreach programs thinly disguised as
non-denominational because they often appear to have quicker and better
results.

However, any fundamentalist groups given the imprimatur
and backing of the Jewish community would most likely also have quick
results, because a certain percentage of people are drawn to simple
answers to complex questions and to religious leaders who draw the world
in black or white with no shades of gray. At the same time
funders have shied away from funding truly secular programing, bastions
of secularism like the Forward have been taken over by Jews who identify
as religious and who themselves identify as Jewish through religion,
not through culture. This impacts their papers’ and organizations’
output and limits their products’ appeal to secular cultural Jews.Also,
powerful synagogue and rabbinical groups often effectively block
community secular programing which is frequently viewed by the rabbis
and synagogue groups as both threatening and heretical.

This
year’s Workmen’s Circle survey may show that younger secular cultural
Jews are finally choosing to stay within the Jewish community and to
begin to fight for their share of communal resources.The Workman's Circle issued a press release on the survey that notes that:

Many Jews today fit into another category, that of the engaged and congregationally unaffiliated.
This group, according to the survey, makes up 16% of Jews in the
United States, or about 1 million of the 6 million Jews in the country.
These individuals say that being Jewish is very important in their lives
and that they actively seek Jewish expression and engagement outside of
a synagogue.These characteristics put them in marked contrast to other categories
of non-Orthodox Jews in this extensive study — the engaged and
congregationally affiliated, the congregationally affiliated but
unengaged (those who join synagogues but rarely attend), and the
unengaged and congregationally unaffiliated.While the engaged and congregationally unaffiliated are not synagogue
members — they typically attend religious services only once or twice a
year on average — they still show numerous signs of Jewish engagement.
They also tend to be attached to Israel and demonstrate noticeably
strong commitments to economic justice and social equality.They are also exceptional in their progressive political views. Of
note, nearly twice as many of the engaged and congregationally
unaffiliated Jews compared to others see economic justice issues as
important “to a great extent,” identify as pro-labor to a great extent,
and see the current federal tax system as unfair.Furthermore, these individuals tend not to describe themselves as
religious, secular, or anti-religious. Rather, they typically identify
themselves as cultural Jews and see their Jewish identity as more fluid
than others have in previous generations. They frequently self-define
as “spiritual.”

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